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Missing Malaysian Airlines B777

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Comment

I encouraged members to avoid speculation, but both your recent comments are looking horribly like being true.

My concern is for the relatives/loved ones of the passengers and crew seeking answers - the unknown will never bring any sort of closure for them.

Some of the unanswered issues are -
- Transponder - who, why or what made it become non operational ?
- If the aircraft simply finally fell out of the sky due to fuel starvation without any flight crew controlling it then it would have made anything bar a 'pancake' landing on sea or land. Therefore some identifiable debris would have been seen somewhere by now.
- What of any automated data from the aircraft relayed automatically to Boeing and/or Rolls Royce. This data can indicate if the aircraft finally just ceased to send data abruptly or ............?

Comment

As someone said, they are looking for a needle in a haystack, but they have yet to find the haystack.

I followed CNN on this at first but soon dropped them because they would pick up the slightest speculation and sensationalize it, probably causing a lot of false hopes and trauma to the families in the process. Not to mention that they spend about a quarter of their airtime blowing their own trumpet. I'm not saying the other channels don't do it to some degree but CNN took the cake. None of the other channels that I watch have picked this one up yet.

Anyway thanks for sharing the link, let's see what develops.

sigpicHindsight is what you see from the tailgunner's position...

Comment

they had some horrible ineffective "consultant". That's for sure! On the news side they have been on the fore front with excellent pedagogic material. That made the diff for me. Even if the 24hr CNN mode can be annoying for some.

The only thing I didn't really like is their PDF reader interface that didn't allow for downloading public ressources. That's was a blow.

Comment

In the end I decided not to watch the Horizon because I could not see what new they could bring to the party. It would appear I was right in making that assumption.
As far as that dread word "closure" is concerned, unless the relatives believe that 200 plus people are alive on a remote ocean island or in the jungles of Asia, the inevitable truth is that there were no survivors. As great a tragedy as it is a mystery. And maybe one which will remain unsolved.

Charlie

Keep smiling - it's never as bad as you think!!

Comment

I read on a CNN internet story last week that their well-paid talking head "expert" Mary Schiavo (an attorney and neither a pilot or engineer...rather she made her name in the Inspector Generals office of the Dept. of Transportation) voiced her opinion that the longer we go without wreckage, the more likely it was NOT terrorism, suicide or whatever. ? ? ?

How she came up with that I have no idea.
If a mechanical issue eventually caused the plane to impact the water why couldn't it be just as likely that a man-caused incident forced it to hit that same patch of ocean?

There are two sides to every story. The truth is usually somewhere between the two.

Comment

Perhaps on the assumption that no terrorist organisation has publically claimed responsibility, but that would not rule out a lone "nutter" working outside the remit of a known terror group. Nor would it rule out a 'simple' act of selfish suicidice, nor rule out the option that by keeping quiet a terrorist group might be about to embark on further "unclaimed" acts like this in order to scare the wider public/undermine public trust in established "security measures" etc - i.e. it's far more disturbing to know there is someone out there taking planes down and not know who is behind that, than it is to know who is behind an ongoing campaign.

However, IMHO, the fact that (to date) there have been no further instances of this type suggests it is probably not the start of an orchestrated campaign, but rather an isolated instance.

But as to whether it was mechanical failure, suicide, "one man band " terrorist? The worrying thing is that we may never know...

Comment

I don't think Aviation can allow this to go unsolved. Not when it involves a large airline and a very popular long haul aircraft.
A great deal of time, effort and money is going to be poured into the Indian Ocean over the coming years. We must either solve this incident or at least find evidence to a plausible reason for it.

Comment

They will not find this aircraft.
In a few years a trawler will snag a piece of wreckage, an islander will find an item of luggage washed up on a beach and maybe then they will realize
where the aircraft came down and find it.
It's even possible the aircraft crashed on land in a remote area.
Still pretty amazing in this day and age that an aircraft can vanish with so many souls on board.

Australian authorities suggested that Flight 370's crew may have been in an "unresponsive" state, possibly caused by a lack of oxygen.
That scenario "appeared to best fit the available evidence for the final period of MH370's flight," the report said, citing previous air accidents in which crews had been rendered unresponsive by a lack of oxygen, also known as hypoxia.
But it cautioned that the assumption was "made for the purposes of defining a search area and there is no suggestion that the investigation authority will make similar assumptions."

One remark:

The cockpit and cabin are not hermetically sealed. That means that there was a contamination from one of the volumes to the other. The way that contamination spread is the route toward an explanation of the incident. Whatever that contamination was (loss of pressure, fumes, Li battery gases, criminal act...).

Last but not least, it's now reasonable to think that some or a few of the passengers might have survived until the very last second of the aircraft. I hope that everybody interested by solving this enigma for the only sake of public transportation safety will keep that hypothesis in mind.

Comment

If this was a lack of oxygen issue, then it must have been caused by some catastrophic failure that was so fast, the pilots had no time to don their masks. But this instant failure does not account for why neither of the pilots attempted a radio call or putting their masks on in the 15 to 20 seconds of useful consciousness the oxygen at that flight level would allow for. I don't buy it.

It also could not have been a slow and gradual pressurisation issue, like the Helios 737, because moments before the plane went off course, the pilot responded to a change of frequency notification from Kuala Lumpur ATC. His voice sound identical in demeanour, clarity and speed from previous communications from the flight crew, both on the ground and airborne. This is forgetting the far more sophisticated pressurisation systems on board the 777 which would have alerted the crew to a problem long before there was any danger of hypoxia.

In short, I don't buy the lack of oxygen/pressurisation/hypoxia theories. They don't fit.

Comment

The hypoxia hypothesis (wow, try saying that with a drink in ya!) doesn't account for the dramatic course change.
And I don't buy the somewhat silly notion that an experienced crew try to turn the plane first before donning their masks. It goes against everything Pilots are taught.
And it can't be slow onset hypoxia as only moments before, the pilot responded to a direction to change frequency and sounded perfectly alert.